The celebrations, thanks to 9-11, focused more on military memories than they have in previous Memorial Days, it seemed to me...

I watched the ones looking at the Vietnam Memorial, the walls in which the names of all the American soldiers who died in Vietnam, and was thinking to myself,

Here, for once, is a tasteful memorial...

A very personalized one, as people searched for names of relatives and loved ones and people they once went to class with.

As far as I know, I have no close friend whose name is written on that wall.

Yet, for but the luck of the draft lottery---my name would probably have been on there. And that's a sobering thought.

I don't want to get all Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra on you, but if I had died in the Vietnam War, Barb would doubtless be married to someone else---and perhaps with children who were totally normal, instead of two-thirds autistic. Neither one of us has any real history of autism on either side of the family, so it's something in the combination of the two of us...

On the other hand, given the odds on divorce these days, she might be starting on her second husband, or her third. It's very rare that you find a love that will last you twenty-two years, the way ours has.

No Jamie. No Brian. No Eric. They would have never been. Barb might have had other kids, but never their particular combination of genes and traits.

Expunged from history. If I had been drafted, with my lousy eyesight and lousier aim, I could have easily been a casualty. I might have gotten a job as a clerk, I might have been a mechanic, I might have learned some other technical field...

Yet on the ground, in the infantry...? I could easily see myself killed.

Another name inscribed on the black wall.

I'm not going to make a major tragedy of it, nevertheless. My siblings would have gotten along fine without me. Both my sister and my brother would have missed me, but I wouldn't have left a major loss in their lives. My parents would have grieved, certainly, but my father would have been proud of me dying for my country...at the same time my brother would have thought it underscored the futility of the Vietnam War.

Life would have continued on. You wouldn't be reading my journal, but it would be a minor loss, to say the least. A few changes would have happened...a certain story in which I contributed the plot wouldn't have occured in Superman comics, a suggestion I made to Philip Jose Farmer wouldn't have added the Time Traveller to the Wold Newton Family tree (I was very proud when he wrote back and said that was a good idea, which is why the Time Traveller was added to Doc Savage's family tree between the hardcover and softcover editions...)

Otherwise, not much would have changed, except for those like Barb whose life was intimately intertwined with mine---and she would never realize she had missed anything.

Yet---reverse that equation. Life has gone on without the participation of the lives of the men and women who died in the morass of Vietnam, whose name are inscribed on the wall.

How many lives would those thousands of people have effected, how many children would have been born that have never been, how many lives were affected because they chose to fight for a war that---right or wrong---they conceived as defending our country?

Those lives are not just those who gave up their lives up to then---but the lives they might have had, and the improvements and changes in our world they could have brought.

When we sleep safe in our beds, and wake up, because of their sacrifice---realize that they sacrificed not only the lives they had---but the lives they might have had.

Thank you seems such an---inadequate---phrase...for that sacrifice.